The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America [Hardcover]

Maury Klein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2008

The dramatic story of the “power revolution” that turned America from an agrarian society into a technological superpower, and the dynamic, fiercely  competitive inventors and entrepreneurs who made it happen—a riveting historical saga to rival McCullough’s The Great Bridge or Larson’s Thunderstruck.
Maury Klein, author of Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929, is one of America’s most acclaimed historians of business and industry. In The Power Makers, he offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yet—the “power revolution” that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century.
The steam engine, the incandescent bulb, the electric motor—inventions such as these replaced backbreaking toil with machine labor and changed every aspect of daily life in the span of a few generations. The power revolution is not a tale of machines, however, but of men: inventors such as James Watt, Elihu Thomson, and Nikola Tesla; entrepreneurs such as George Westinghouse; savvy businessmen such as J.P. Morgan, Samuel Insull, and Charles Coffin of General Electric. Striding among them like a colossus is the figure of Thomas Edison, who was creative genius and business visionary at once. With consummate skill, Klein recreates their discoveries, their stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and their unceasing, tumultuous, and ferocious battles in the marketplace.
In Klein’s hands, their personalities and discoveries leap off the page. The Power Makers is a dazzling saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and  business competition at its most naked and cutthroat—a tale of America in its most astonishing decades.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In an ambitious and expansive narrative, Klein (Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929) chronicles the advent of steam power and the electrification of America. Klein's descriptions of the science of steam power, beginning with James Watt, and electricity are clear and detailed. He is especially strong when exploring the confounding engineering feats needed to make electricity a commercially feasible commodity. The heart of the book is the collision of entrepreneurs, inventors and financiers, and the epic battle between two icons of American industry, Edison and Westinghouse, to control and profit from the electrification of America. Along the way Klein brings dramatically to life the triumphs and disappointments, both human and technical, as the fledging electric companies sought to service American homes and businesses. In a well-written and satisfying account, Klein makes readers aware of the magnitude of the energy, genius and tenacity of not only Edison—whose development of the world's first power station in 1881 on New York's Pearl Street was a momentous accomplishment—but also of Westinghouse and many others whose discoveries and vision made cheap electricity possible. B&w illus. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In the American West, lines have always been easily, visibly drawn in the sand: rancher versus environmentalist, wilderness versus development, public land versus private. And while these special-interest groups stewed, the land suffered. Practices such as overgrazing threatened to permanently deplete the soil, and economically overburdened ranchers saw their pastures turned into planned communities. As the rhetoric between the various factions continued to rise, however, a paradigm shift was slowly taking place. Born of a common desire for healthy food and clean water, and an inherent respect for wildlife and nature, a movement termed “new ranch” developed, undertaken by people who believed that the same practices that benefit the environment can also be productive for livestock. A former activist turned land-restoration emissary, White traveled throughout the West visiting ranches, national parklands, and remote wilderness areas that showcased the successful implementation of this innovative, environmentally friendly way of working the land. With an impassioned yet reasoned approach, White gives new hope for an endangered way of life. --Carol Haggas

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press; First Edition edition (May 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596914122
• ISBN-13: 978-1596914124
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #388,347 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Read, August 7, 2009

By 

Thomas M. Sullivan (Lake George, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America (Paperback)

I was born and raised in Schenectady, New York, at a time when the locals still proudly, if a bit ruefully, referred to it as "The City That Lights and Hauls the World" because it was home to both the sprawling General Electric Company and the then-diminishing American Locomotive Company. But I didn't realize until reading this superb book that I never really understood how GE came to evolve out of the earlier Edison enterprises nor how and why it became headquartered in my home town. Nor did I realize how most of the giants behind the "energizing" of America, men like Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, and Insull ended their lives, with the exception of Edison, disassociated from their great innovations, disillusioned with their business undertakings, and in the case of Insull, the unheralded pioneer of electric power distribution, indicted.

I do now, thanks to this marvelously well-written survey of the history of steam and electricity in our country. I agree with the other reviewers that the technical discussions get a bit "thick" from time to time, and even perhaps fall somewhat short of how senior MIT and RPI engineering wonks would set them out, but I reminded myself as I read through them that this is not the story of the devices, but rather the story of the men behind them, and that story could hardly be better told. This distinction brought to mind Kate Colquhoun's delightful, "Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking:" the reader need not get hung up on the recipes described by the author; their significance lies in their time and place and what they reflected of their preparers and consumers.

So it is with "The Power Makers." Professor Klein tells the story of the great inventors and their innovations so seamlessly and authoritatively that I would rank him right up there with the great historians of my reading experience, Ferguson, Schama, Hibbert, Porter, Anderson, Farwell and, well, you get the idea.

Finally, have you ever interrupted a really pleasurable history read and thought to yourself, I wonder if the author enjoyed writing this as much as I am enjoying reading it? My guess is Klein certainly did and had some very good idea that he was producing not only the definitive popular history of the subject but a book that is nothing short of a total joy to read. Highly recommended.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's Tough Translating a Technical Subject into Simple Langauge, October 14, 2009

By 

R. Mansmann (Boonton, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America (Paperback)

Book is very good, although the explanations of early alternating current pilots and preliminary designs are a jumble of technical accuracy and layman's language. Not much different from the experiences of a college freshman in a second semester physics class.

I also tripped over the use of expressions like "in the limelight", I struggling with whether that was intentional or not in describing the people who installed arc lighting in Manhattan.

These minor criticisms aside, it's a great book in bringing the personalities of the inventors into a dry technical subject, and also because the author provides excellent insight into the dramatic leapos in technology that took significant study to theorize, identify through experimentation, and define through physics and mathematics.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History Does Rhyme, June 11, 2008

By 

Steve Booth-Butterfield (Morgantown, WV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America (Hardcover)

The value of this book shows most clearly in Chapter 13, Competition and Electrocution. An enterprising screenplay writer could develop a script that would rival, "There Will Be Blood." We see the clash in Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, capital punishment, a commodity speculator names Hyacinthe Secretan, an obscure engineer named Harold Brown, and all the forces of growth in modern society colliding in New York City at the turn of the 19th century. Reading that chapter made me think about how little things have changed in society over the past 100 years and that we're still living in the Modern World after all.

Professor Klein takes a detailed (and at times a painstakingly detailed) look at the people and ideas that led to the invention and distribution of energy and power in America from roughly 1880 through 1930. The first half of the book is a slow read. It traces the biography of key people (James Watt, for example) and ideas (the steam engine) in a fairly straightforward, linear narrative. It is a long setup, but the back half of the book pays it all off as Klein then begins to weave a broader narrative of social forces (politics, economics, journalism, and those great characters with American grit, ambition, and craziness) with these key people and ideas.

It's hard not to see this same kind of script playing out in America (and the rest of the world through globalization) with new techologies like computers. In many ways the world is not PostModern, but still in a Modern phase as we learn how to integrate new techologies into normal human society. It's just hilarious to read about politicians and journalists howling about capital punishment (yes), greed, science, and virtue from 1880. It's like reading the New York Times today. Just change the names and you've got the same kinds of challenges, problems, and questions.

A fascinating book that requires a little commitment through the early chapters.